The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

The Fires of History — Episode 2

The Sun never formally retracted. The hoax made it the best-selling paper in the world, the gains were permanent, and Locke’s own obituary called it “the most successful scientific joke ever published.” Why apologize for the best business decision you ever made?

The Setup

The New York Sun was a two-year-old penny paper, founded in 1833 by Benjamin Henry Day. Cheap, sold on the street by newsboys, supported by advertising rather than subscription. It belonged to a new species of publication — the penny press — whose audience was not the educated class but the masses, and the masses wanted entertainment.

On August 21, 1835, the Sun advertised an upcoming feature: a series of articles reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science about astonishing astronomical discoveries. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had ceased publication in 1833. Most American readers would not have known this.

The first article appeared on August 25. Five more followed over the next six days.

The Six Articles

Article 1 (August 25) described a new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, allegedly built by Sir John Herschel — a real and distinguished astronomer who happened to be in South Africa surveying the southern sky. The instrument weighed almost seven tons and supposedly magnified by 42,000 times. A “hydro-oxygen microscope” projected its images onto a canvas screen. None of it was physically possible. All of it was rendered in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century engineering.

Article 2 (August 26) reported the first life: lunar landscapes covered in dark red flowers, brown bison, blue unicorns, grey pelicans, black cranes.

Article 3 (August 27) added thirty-eight species of tree, seventy plants, nine mammals, and the inaugural appearance of the bipedal beaver — tail-less, walking upright, carrying its young in its arms “like a human being,” living in huts heated by fire.

Article 4 (August 28) delivered the bombshell. Vespertilio-homo — man-bat. Copper-haired humanoids with semi-transparent membrane wings and yellowish flesh-colored faces. The text classified them in Latin and described their wings in detailed anatomical prose.

Article 5 (August 29) introduced an abandoned temple of polished sapphire and a superior race of man-bats “of infinitely greater personal beauty,” described as “scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters.”

Article 6 (August 31) concluded with the lunar Temple of the Moon. The series ended abruptly when the telescope’s lens, conveniently left aimed at the sun, melted itself into uselessness. No further observations would be possible.

All six articles were attributed to “Dr. Andrew Grant,” a colleague of Herschel’s. Dr. Grant did not exist.

The Author

Richard Adams Locke was a thirty-four-year-old Cambridge-educated Englishman, two years off the boat in America, employed as a reporter at the Sun. He intended the articles as satire. His specific target was Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who had argued in bestselling books that the Moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants. Locke wanted to demonstrate how easily readers swallowed scientific authority when it confirmed what religion had already promised them.

The satire failed completely. Readers did not laugh at Dick. They believed Locke.

Locke did not publicly admit authorship until 1840, in a letter to the weekly paper New World. He left the Sun in 1836, tried to repeat the success with “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park” — a faked account of the Scottish explorer — and failed, because by then everyone knew who he was. He died on Staten Island in 1871. His obituary in the Sun called the hoax “the most successful scientific joke ever published.”

The Circulation Explosion

Before the hoax, all eleven New York newspapers together circulated about 26,500 copies in a city of 250,000. During the hoax, the Sun claimed a daily circulation of 19,360 — beating the London Times and making the Sun the best-selling daily newspaper in the world. By mid-afternoon on publication days, no copy could be bought in the city at any price.

The gains were permanent. The circulation never dropped back.

A committee of scientists from Yale travelled to New York to find the original Edinburgh Journal of Science articles. Sun employees ran them back and forth between the printing and editorial offices in a deliberate runaround. The Yale scientists returned to New Haven without ever realizing they had been tricked.

Ships carried copies to Europe. French and Italian newspapers reprinted the story with illustrations. A lithograph of a bat-man was printed in Naples. English and French scientific journals reprinted the articles without naming the Sun as the source, lending the hoax the authority of their letterhead. The Sun printed pamphlet editions — reportedly 60,000 copies sold. Only sixteen are known to survive.

The Exposure That Wasn’t

The Journal of Commerce, a competing New York paper, was skeptical from the first article and published rebuttals. Locke privately confessed to a writer at the Journal, and the word traveled back. Other journalists pointed out that no such supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science existed, since the journal itself had ceased publication two years earlier.

On September 16, 1835, the Sun published an acknowledgment that the articles were fabricated. The acknowledgment was casual. There was no formal retraction. There was no apology. The Sun had already gotten what it wanted — permanent circulation, national name recognition, international fame. Apologizing for the best business decision you ever made would have been bad business.

Herschel’s Reaction

Sir John Herschel first heard about the hoax in South Africa and was reportedly amused. “It is too bad my real discoveries here won’t be that exciting.” The amusement did not last. He was besieged with correspondence from people who believed the stories. He eventually wrote: “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the moon — in English, French, Italian, and German.”

He spent the rest of his life explaining to serious people that no, he had not discovered bat-men on the Moon.

The Poe Subplot

In June 1835, two months before the Sun’s first article, Edgar Allan Poe had published “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” in the Southern Literary Messenger — a story about a man who travels to the Moon by balloon and discovers its inhabitants. Poe intended his story as a hoax. Locke’s hoax landed first and stole the entire premise.

Poe was furious. In a letter to his benefactor J. P. Kennedy: “From many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those Discoveries I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself.”

The accusation had teeth. Richard Adams Locke had been the editor who handled Poe’s piece at the Southern Literary Messenger. Locke had read Poe’s moon story before writing his own.

Poe later moderated, professing to accept Locke’s denial. The professional courtesy was probably diplomatic fiction. Poe continued to argue that “Hans Pfaall” was more scientifically rigorous than the Sun’s articles. He was right on the technical merits and wrong about the point. Locke understood that readers do not want plausibility. They want spectacle.

Poe would later pull his own “Balloon-Hoax” of 1844 in the same New York Sun. The trade learned from itself.

The Penny Press as Trolling Infrastructure

Traditional newspapers cost five or six cents and were sold by subscription to merchants and professionals. The Sun sold for one cent on the street. The audience was no longer the elite. The audience was everyone, and everyone was paying.

The penny press of the 1830s and 1840s operated under different rules than modern journalism:

• No meaningful distinction between news and entertainment
• No professional code of ethics
• No fact-checking infrastructure
• No wire services
• Low scientific literacy in the readership
• High trust in printed authority
• Competition on sensation rather than accuracy

The Sun’s motto was “It Shines for All.” Translated: we will print whatever sells.

The Barnum Parallel

P. T. Barnum arrived in New York in 1835, the same year as the Moon Hoax, with his own opening scam — the exhibition of Joice Heth, a blind and partially paralyzed enslaved woman whom Barnum claimed was 161 years old and had been George Washington’s childhood nursemaid. When public interest waned, Barnum wrote an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper claiming Heth was actually a machine made of whalebone and leather. Attendance doubled.

He was manufacturing controversy to sell tickets, the same way the Sun was manufacturing moon discoveries to sell newspapers. The New York Herald explicitly compared Barnum’s Joice Heth deception to “the lunar hoax perpetrated by its competitor the New York Sun.” Contemporaries understood the two operations as one phenomenon.

Barnum would buy Scudder’s American Museum in 1841, rename it Barnum’s American Museum, and crown himself “The Prince of Humbugs.” His core argument was simple: hoaxes are justified if the public receives entertainment value in return. The “sucker born every minute” quote is misattributed, but the spirit is correct. Credibility is a resource to be mined, not preserved.

Why This Matters

The Great Moon Hoax was not the first newspaper hoax. It was the first to go viral — to spread internationally, to dominate public conversation for weeks, to fool scientists and laypeople alike, and to permanently improve the business fortunes of its publisher. It was a proof of concept.

It proved that sensation sells, that credibility is a borrowed instrument rather than an earned one, that there is no penalty for lying at scale, that the audience is complicit, and that the retraction is itself content. The exposure of the hoax generated a second wave of attention and sales. Being caught was part of the business model, not a failure of it.

The penny press was the first mass medium cheap enough and fast enough to function as a platform for manufactured reality. The Sun demonstrated that the platform’s incentives naturally select for sensation over truth. The medium has changed many times since 1835. The incentive structure has not. The Moon Hoax connects directly to yellow journalism, to tabloid culture, to internet hoaxes, to fake-news factories in Veles. Attention is the currency. Truth is the cost of doing business.

Locke did not invent lying. He industrialized it.

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